As travellers were getting ready to make use of the Bank Holiday weekend, British Airways’ IT system decided to take a break too.
Around 75,000 passengers were stranded at airports worldwide as British Airways experienced a global systems outage on Saturday Morning which caused the airline to cancel all flights.
In a statement over the weekend, the chief executive of BA, Alex Cruz, pinned the outage on a power supply issue. He goes on to clarify that this was not a result of a cyber attack, but down to hardware failure.
It’s scenarios like this which highlight two things;
- The reliance on server side technology
- The importance of having a backup or contingency plan
Large organisations such as British Airways depend heavily on a functioning IT system to operate their business. The outage only visually demonstrates what happens if such a system was to fail.
However, this wasn’t the issue of just one computer, it was every computer that was connected to BA’s global network. In short, the Servers that hold British Airways system failed.
Without jumping to conclusions on how such a large organisation as British Airways could be susceptible to such failure, it brings to the attention that complex IT systems do fail from time to time.
When your organisation relies heavily on server technologies to run critical applications, you would want to ensure that your servers are running in a resilient environment and that they are kept in optimal operating conditions. It would be highly recommended to regularly review your IT infrastructure to protect yourself against such scenarios.
You also want to ensure that you have a robust backup plan in the event of downtime. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard that backups have failed to work. In fact, there have been high-profile situations where backups have never been tested and are found to have never worked in the first place; rendering them redundant. It took a serious incident for the company to realise this, and by then it was too late.
Coupled with the recent incidents of the WannaCry ransomware virus, having a backup or reviewing backup systems has become a high priority task for many, if not all, businesses no matter how large or small.
It’s worth getting in touch with your IT team or provider to run a health check on your system servers as a proactive measure to reduce the chance of such crippling scenarios.
We’re offering a free health check for anyone who is looking to review their server environment or set up. Give us a call or drop us an email. You know where to find us.
